Justice Dept. Does Not Compile Statistics on Solitary Confinement, Killings by Police or Prison Assaults

The U.S. Department of Justice has two offices that compile statistics about criminal matters. But it doesn’t keep track of some things that might cast a bad light on the justice system.

For starters, despite recent high-profile police killings of unarmed civilians, there are no official numbers on how often this happens. That question has been left to outsiders, such as The Washington Post, which found nearly 400 people—armed and unarmed—have been killed by police officers so far this year.

Justice statisticians also don’t know how many prisoners are locked away in solitary confinement. “There are estimates, but no official count nationwide,” Bruce Western, a professor of sociology at Harvard University, told The Atlantic.

Ford also noted that the Justice Department can’t say how many non-sexual assaults occur in the prison system. “We have anecdotal evidence and some data in individual states that violence is rising in prisons, but we don’t have good, national database collection on that,” Marie Gottschalk, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, told Ford.